The Chinese dream

When I first saw this article posted somewhere, I didn’t think much of it until I realized I’d seen some of these posters myself outside a nearby fire station. Apparently it’s part of a government-sponsored publicity campaign about the Chinese dream (中国梦). The images on the posters are from traditional Chinese arts such as paper cutouts, woodblock figures and so on. To be honest, they look quite good, so much that I initially thought they were promoting some arts festival or museum. The posters have deeper goals than just aesthetics, which the article talks about. The posters feature slogans about positive ideals, whilst poems or sayings are written on them as well.

Here’re two posters from outside a fire station in Beijing. The leftmost poster on the top one is headlined “da ai Zhong Guo” or Big Love for China, while the poster on the right says “zhu fu zhu zi” (I guessed the last character since it’s hard to make out), which I guess would be bless the ancestors and children.

The poster in the middle below says “Zhongguo hao haizi” or China’s good children, and the one on the right says Zhongguo _ niu jingshen (I don’t know what’s the middle character in red), which means China_vigorous bull. The leftmost poster says “xi qu gao zou” which I think means good music, high performance.